When I was in the hospital, I had a chat with the chaplain. I was not asked if I wanted to have this chat beforehand, but I did not mind. At that point with all the drugs pumping through my veins, I would have talked with anyone.
He told me that I may feel survivor’s guilt at some point, which I didn’t while I was in the hospital. Wait. That’s not exactly true. One day, while I was lying in bed as I was for much of my first few days awake, I overheard my care team talking about another patient. She was a young woman in her twenties and had just died from COVID. I felt survivor’s guilt then because she was so young and had died. More info came out such as she had not been vaxxed, nor had her entire family. And it turned out her mother died as well.
Later, I realized that the whole thing probably did not happen. I hallucinated a lot while I was in the hospital, and this was probably one of the delusions. It just did not make sense that they would all be talking about this patient and that they all knew her outside of the hospital, even though the family were ranchers with a website. Yes, this was what my brain was telling me was the truth. I don’t think any of it happened, but it did make me feel guilty that I had survived while this mythical twenty-two year old had died.
When I went home, I was mostly profoundly grateful to be alive. I was amazed at how brilliant everything was. Well, not everything as I had to deal with the family dysfunction, but apart from that, everything was awesome.
I didn’t think about much of anything, to be honest, for the first month. I was just resting up and regaining my strength. I started slowly with my Taiji, only doing stretching the first few weeks. I did try the sword on day three, just three movements. That was way too much, but it also showed me that I would get it back again eventually.
That was the important part. I needed to know that I would still be able to do my weapons. I didn’t care about anything else, really, in the first few weeks. I could not see properly, so I could not do much online for the first week. My brother made the font larger so I could read websites, but that was for very brief amounts of time.